Today I'm going to explore a question that's been rattling around in my head, "Why does software inevitably get worse over time?". Every software systems I've worked on inevitably decays and becomes difficult to work with, despite everyone's best intentions. Why is this? Well, I've come to believe that this is a systemic effect, resulting from the businesses hyper-focus on immediate profit, causing a mis-balance between exploitation and exploration. ## Exploitation vs Exploration: The [exploitation vs exploration dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration-exploitation_dilemma) is a key factor in any decision that factors in...
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Recently I've been thinking about folder structures, specifically how we structure our web apps to encourage the design we want and to enable other developers to explore and understand the codebase. This train of thought was spurred by a problem we faced with one of our apps, which I'll go into shortly. ## Folders Give Context When we open up an application the folder structure is the first thing we see, even before we glance down at the readme. It conveys the hierarchy of concepts and hopefully how they relate to each other. A haphazard folder hurts more than it helps, especially if you have to hop around from folder to folder. Ch...
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Traits in PHP are a bit shite. At best they are an ineffective way to append functionality to a class, at worst they are an anti-pattern. They are often used as toggles for internal functionality (see Laravel's Acceptance tests) or as a lazy way to share common functions across a bunch of classes without using another pattern. # Why are they bad? ## Reading: They're hard to read. If you see that a class uses a trait, you have to open the trait to see what it's adding to the class. Usually the trait uses protected properties of the class, this means you have to flip between the trait and the parent class to figure out the type of...
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